From language learning I know and enjoy the spaced repetition learning flashcard app Anki. The desktop software is free and open source. For phones there is an official iphone app (costs money) and a free open source android app created by volunteers, but you can also do revisions by using the mobile friendly website without any app. Spaced repetition learning is very powerful as the algorithm decides for you when you should do your revisions, in increasing intervals if you answer correctly.

Anyway, there are several user-created bird decks. I only studied those for western Europe so can’t give a specific US recommendation but you can find bird decks here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/Birds

For just learning US bird calls e.g. the deck “Birds of North America” might be sufficient. Or use the Ultimate Birds deck which is huge and has birds from all over the world. With the Ultimate Birds deck you can use tags to create a filtered deck which only contains species of North America (the posted link contains instructions). The notes of the deck contain information in fields that you can use to create different types of cards via card templates. Fields are e.g. sounds, images, English (English name) or Scientific (scientific name). For call recognition you can create a card type sounds -> English which has the sounds on the front and the English name and image on the back side. But you can also create card types for recognizing images or learning scientific names etc.

Anki has a learning curve, but there’s lots of material online about Anki, e.g. tons of youtube videos (apparently many med students use it for memorization) and it can be very powerful.

Bin Fan von Immersion, daher French Press oder Aeropress wenn ich den Kaffee nur für mich mache. Benutze die Rezepte von James Hoffman, er lässt sich Zeit, und dafür bekommt man konsistent gute Extraktion, bei relativ simpler Zubereitung. Die Kaffeebohnen male ich selbst und wechsle zwischen Lavazza und ähnlichen Supermarktbohnen und Spezialitätenkaffee.

Exactly. I’m not a psychologist or biologist but from what I read, while we are alive, our bodies tend towards homeostasis, a chemically balanced state. Simply, you cannot be in a high-dopamine “happy” state all the time without going back to a neutral or down state afterwards. Even without drugs, highs are usually followed by lows. Not trying to be happy at all times but accepting that sometimes, there are hardships, will help you having a fullfilled and content life.

Anyway, that homeostasis does not mean that everyone is equally happy/unhappy on average. On the one side there are people with depression and on the other side people whose lives have many happy moments. What helps for me is connecting with friends and family, going into nature and seeing animals, doing exercise and having off-screen time, mindfullness and generally having some work-life balance. Which I admit not everyone can afford and I am privileged to have. Doing or having those things helps me having a happier and more fullfilled life, but sometimes life still sucks, there is no happy-all-the-time.

I only need three touches, using the MessageEase English with Symbols layout ln thumb key. That layout shows the single quote on the alpabetical “front” layer, while it is hidden behind a symbol layer in the default layout. Tou can find the layout list in the settings.

Hatte die gleiche Frage gehabt. Wollte meinen Account auf einer “kleineren” Instanz als lemmy.ml machen mit lokalen Servern und da war feddit naheliegend. Aber habe gemerkt, dass es zu vielen meiner Hobbies, die auf Reddit vertreten waren, noch nicht einmal Englische communities gibt.

Comment threads are collapsible afaik, just touch and hold onea comment and release again. Admittedly there are no visual hints that this is possible, there a tutorial or something like that might help.

Also see Wikipedia’s list of common misconceptions. And related: xkcd.com/843.

Toll! Da bin ich neidisch, habe leider keinen Ofen. Interessiere mich seit einiger Zeit für Fermetation und würde mal gerne einen eigenen Sauerteig ansetzen…

Definitely the opposite of “light”, but you mentioned chess and if you’re into something similar but very different, you might try learning #Go together on online-go.com. That site has a very short introduction into the game under the Learn tab, but it only covers the very basics and initially you will have no idea what you’re doing. The rules are simple, but there is a lot of complexity that arises from that and professionals study the game for years. But even as a complete beginner it’s fun. Full on 19x19 games can take a long time, but games on a 9x9 board are fairly quick, comparable to a chess game.

Still, this would be a journey. If you want something not turn-based and relaxing to play while chatting maybe try something else but I can’t give any recommendations.

I often share (“boost”) lemmy posts on mastodon. I would like to be able to add hashtags to the boosted post, because on mastodon I rely on hashtags to find content that interests me (e.g. I follow certain hashtag. Lemmy doesn’t need those because the general theme and topic is often obvious from the community context it was posted in, but this context is lost when sharing on mastodon. For example, when I post something in c/baduk@lemmy.ml, for lemmy users it will be clear that this post is about Baduk (the Korean name for the game of Go). But when I boost the post on my private mastodon, it’s not obvious anymore that this was posted in a Baduk community and the Baduk-interested people on mastodon will never see the post except if they follow me or the lemmy comunity. All solutions that come to my mind seem a bit awkward, are there any best-practices for that?